Top 10 Lightning Experience Gems of Salesforce Summer’18 Release!

With each new release, Lightning Experience is getting sophisticated and robust. It is now faster, quicker and easier to maintain. If you are still using Salesforce Classic user interface, Summer’18 release will give you hundreds of reasons to switch to Lighting Experience. Some of the key features, that are now available in Lightning, include –Encourage Users to Adopt Lightning Experience, Get Insight into User Activities with the Lightning Usage App, Products: Work with Schedules in Lightning Experience and Boost the Effectiveness of Email Templates with HTML, etc.

Currently, Summer’18release is available under the pre-release program.On the 4th and 5th of May, Sandboxes will be upgraded; as a result, your organization will get the look and feel ofSummer’18 release.

If you have not read the entire 476 pages of Salesforce Summer’18 release notes, check out Summer’18 release quick summary written by me.

Icombed through the release notes and highlightedthe most exciting, interesting, and useful Lightning Experience features. Believe me, it was hard to stop at just ten! To kick things off, here is my take on the coolest Lightning features from Summer’18 release.

1)Make Inline Edits While Using Filter Logic:- Inline editing and filtering logic come together to make your list views more powerful. No setup needed! In Lightning Experience, you can start making inline edits to your list views that use filter logic right away.

–> Inline editing does not work for multi-record type list views or when the field is not editable. Salesforce Classic does not support inline editing with filter logic.

2) Get Insight into User Activities with the Lightning Usage App:- Track adoption and usage of Lightning Experience. The Lightning Usage App includes charts for daily and monthly active users, number of users switching to Salesforce Classic, and more. These quantifiable measures help you understand your users’ experience and optimize your resources for training and other support.

3) Do More with Tasks from the List View: – Reps can do much more with tasks now that they can see a list view. Built-in list view filters let reps find tasks quickly, columns are sortable, and reps can apply filters to narrow down what they see.

Reps have three views to work with when viewing and managing tasks. Split view allows them to view record details side-by-side.

4) Streamline Your List Views with Detailed Filters: – You no longer have to switch to Salesforce Classic to use detailed list view filter criteria. Find important data in your list views with more detailed filters in Lightning Experience, and supercharge your sales reps.

Do you want to see all the open leads in your sales queue from a campaign? Stay on top of your accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, and custom objects by surfacing the most relevant information when you need it. With these new filters, you can filter:

Accounts by territory

Contacts by campaign

Leads by queue and campaign

Opportunities by territory

Custom objects by a queue

5) Boost the Effectiveness of Email Templates with HTML: – Make your emails more enticing to readers with styling, tags, and attributes. You can now add HTML to Lightning email templates.

6) Link from Dashboard Components to Website or Salesforce Record:- After giving dashboard readers insights about their business, drive them to take the next step by providing one-click access to Salesforce records or websites.

To link from a dashboard component to the Opportunities tab, add or edit a dashboard component and then enter the custom link. When linking to a website, enter the site’s domain. For example, https://www.salesforce.com/. Be sure to include https://or http:// or www.. If you don’t, Salesforce won’t recognize the destination as a website. Enter salesforce.com (without https:// or www.) and you’ll direct people to https://www.salesforce.com/salesforce.com.

7) Increase Productivity with Inbox Beta for Outlook (Beta): – Inbox Beta for Outlook brings together the best features of Lightning for Outlook and Salesforce Inbox in one solution. It includes all the features of the free version of Lightning for Outlook, plus features to increase sales productivity while working in email.

Using Inbox Beta for Outlook features, sales reps can be even more productive.

More suggestions for related Salesforce objects:- Lightning for Outlook suggests accounts, opportunities, and cases that match addresses on emails and events. In Inbox Beta for Outlook, admins can also set custom objects to include in the suggested list of matching records.

See who’s reading your emails:- Sales reps can enable email tracking to get the notification when someone reads their email.

Schedule emails to send later:-Scheduling emails is very useful when sales reps work different hours than their customers and prospects. Now you can write an email and schedule it to send at a specific date and time.

Insert your meeting availability:- Sales reps insert open slots from their calendar directly into the body of an email. Recipients can click an available option to book the time.

8) Tailor Prerecorded Voicemail Messages for Different Types of Prospects: – Sales reps can record multiple voicemail messages for different types of prospects, then “drop” (or send) the prerecorded messages to recipients’ voicemail boxes. Reps are no longer limited to a single voicemail drop recording. Less time leaving messages means more time selling.

See a prediction graph that shows your team’s past opportunities and predictions about future performance. The graph includes Einstein’s prediction compared to your sales target, and comparisons based on your committed opportunities and best-case forecast. You can also see KPIs above the graph.

10) Organizing your Report and Dashboard Folders in Lightning Experience:- Life can be complicated, but organizing your content just got easier. With subfolders, you can quickly create a logical structure for your report and dashboard folders. The organization can be by region, role, or function, or whatever makes the most sense to you. Moving content between folders is also easier.

When you’re organizing reports and dashboards in folders, subfolders make life easier for everyone. For example, you are responsible for creating reports for your customer service organization. You already have a Sales Reports folder that you are sharing with Sales, so the sales reps can see what issues have come up. But the reps in each region only want to see the reports from customers in their own region. All you have to do is create a subfolder for each region in the sales folder, and woohoo!, the reps in each region get to see only what they’re interested in.

Additional enhancements worth noting!

1. Export Reports, Keep the Formatting: – Sometimes sharing your reports with others means exporting them to Microsoft® Excel®. When you export your reports, we ensure that the formatting you worked so hard on stays intact. The exported report also includes column summaries and totals.

Want the report to take a print out? Use the formatted reportto export the report as it appears in Salesforce, including the report header, groupings, and filter details.

2. Preview Quip Documents and Sheets in Communities: – Starting with Summer‘18, you can preview Quip documents and sheets just like other file type previews. Until now, users who wanted to preview Quip saw a Preview not available message in the place of a preview for Quip documents and sheets. Now, previews are available: